Sadness

Posted on: January 23, 2018

Katherine E. Watkins is a Santa Monica psychiatrist and senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation. The overall goal of her research is to improve the quality of care for individuals with behavioral health disorders, by developing, implementing, and evaluating innovative treatments and treatment models of health care delivery.

Many people when confronted with someone who is sad feel pressure to fix the person’s sadness and make it go away: to say or do just the right thing. I know that I did: I thought I was supposed to cheer up the person suffering, as though they had a problem to be solved. Eventually, I figured out that I could not “fix” someone”s sadness. Yet, the desire to make the sadness go away didn’t leave me. I also didn’t like feeling sad myself, and would try to avoid it through distractions.

Education on emotions helped my anxiety.

Sadness is a core emotion that we have when we experience loss. When core emotions arise, they need to flow. If we hold them back or push them down, the energy they hold gets blocked. Blocked emotions hurt us. Blocked emotions stress our mind and body, eventually causing symptoms like depression, anxiety, and many physical problems like migraines, high blood pressure and more.

To let emotions flow, we need to feel safe enough to experience them. Feeling connected to someone else and sharing the emotion can help make painful emotions easier to bear. Learning what to expect when experiencing an emotion can also make the experience more manageable and less frightening. On my way to becoming an ISTDP therapist, I learned to just be with sadness, my own and other’s, and not try to fix it. I learned my presence, willingness to offer support, and encouragement to let the feeling flow was often enough. Words often weren’t necessary, although an invitation to talk could be helpful. “If you would like to talk about your loss/your sadness, I would like to listen.”

If we are aware that we are sad, we can help ourselves. For example, be compassionate towards yourself. Don’t put pressure on yourself to feel any different than you do. Sadness and grief are painful enough without adding a layer of judgment or pressure to “get over it”on top. To help you move through your sadness, validate it. Take it day by day or minute by minute. Ask yourself what you need for comfort, and give yourself permission to get it. Treat your own sadness and grief the same way you would treat others you love and care about.

For me, it was a great relief to learn that sadness does not need fixing. Permission to feel feelings by offering time, space and presence, is a wonderful gift you can always give to others and to yourself.

Posted in: Fundamentals